Check out these 3D maps of Dark Souls’ deaths and warnings

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The Dark Souls games are hard. I’ve been told this and I believe it to be true. So true, in fact, that my fragile masculinity keeps me from playing them, for fear that I will learn the last 33 years built to nothing and that this whole “gamer skill set” might be an elaborate creation of my mind that translates into no genuine abilities. Maybe the only thing harder than Dark Souls is finding the strength to admit your weakness. Anyway, look at this cool thing!

Twitter user @DriftItem was kind enough to make and share some incredible images they created from the Dark Souls game which shows visualization of “~20000 DS1 bloodstain & soapstone messages” in a 3D map. This image really shows you where folks run into trouble in the game.

Applies to other genres as well. I’ve been saying for over 10 years that the seamless world w/o load screens is one of the most important things that made WoW great. Now guess which feature of the game hardly any WoW-clone ever bothered to copy?

No load screen is nice of course (although Dark Souls does have a few) but I suspect what gabrielonuris is referring to is how the various areas of the game often connect to each other in surprising ways. An example would be coming out of Blight Town the alternate route you find both the cliffs leading to the bottom of New Londo where the drakes are, but also the tower leading up to the lake where you fight the hydra, but it also goes all the way up to the Undead Burg. That’s if I’m remembering it correctly.

I don’t think there’ll ever be a souls-like that’ll ever match up to the Soulsborne games. Too much artistry going on there. Salt and Sanctuary did pretty well though, actually. At this point Ashen and Death’s Gambit are the only thing giving me some hope.

100% agreed. A web of (hard to open) connections between areas and great views in terms of seeing other areas, and walkways, in relation to your current one is so effective at giving you a sense of space to the world. Riven (completely different genre) did it very similar to DS and it works just as well there. There’s just something to this style that makes the gameworld so damn fascinating to uncover and “unlock”.

This is so funny. I started Riven last week and have the recurring thought that it really reminds me of Dark Souls. I did notice the shortcuts similarity, but there’s something else in there too that’s similar.

Dunno, for me that would be more like Batman: Arkham Asylum. Metroidvania to me always implies gaining new abilities and skills that lets you through new areas you might have encountered already. Souls games are usually just key-like items.

Artorias does have some jank phantom hitboxes though, particularly that spinning leap and requires more of that classic Souls-timing needed for many bosses. OnS could have been a lot harder if the AI had them work better as a team, but as it stands they kind of fumble around on their own steam which can be exploited. Can still be a tough battle though, especially with heavier weapons I found.

As brutal as these guys were, the level layout meant you could continuously backup and dodge in relative safety until you found an opening you were comfortable with to get in some hits. For that reason, even as much as I died, I found them less frustrating than Capra’s tiny room and the dogs that gave you no breathing room.

In a way the Dark Souls games are hard, but it’s more that they punish impatience hard. So it’s more a discipline test than a hand eye coordination test.

I think this is the reason these games resonate with so many people because all the deaths doesn’t really lead to frustration but the eventual success leads to a zen-like state of calm. I find the games very soothing.

I find this to be true for the older games, but the later ones (DS3 and Bloodborne especially) have upped the pace of the fights to the point where you need to be able to nail those roll timings. If you frequently die because you mistimed a dodge and ate a boss’s multi-hit combo rather than because you got greedy and overreached, I’d say it’s not just patience that’s needed anymore.

Probably my biggest fault with the games, forced to fail until you succeed. Unlikely to beat any boss until you die repeatedly to learn tricks and then eventually it becomes quite easy. Rarely a skill thing though, more of a remembering a choreographed set of moves

That’s more preference than a fault. You could have leveled the same criticism towards something like Trackmania. Generally speaking trail & error is a very popular style of challenge.

If you had the skill to beat each boss on first try then the fun would be ruined. He’s supposed to beat you until you figure out how to deal with him, like a puzzle. The same can be said for a lot of the tracks in trackmania as well.

Dying is part of the gameplay loop. It’s rarely unfair. You notice the second time around that what killed you was properly announced before and you just didn’t pay enough attention or wasn’t quick enough.

Pretty much any game worth playing has you learning through failure. If not, it’s way too easy to start with. Imagine playing X-Com without ever losing a soldier. It would be completely pointless.

The choreography, move-learning thing is only partially true. It is possible to have an innate skill with Dark Souls that you learn through playing it. People go on about how hard it is but, like myself, I’m guessing a fair few, if not most people, beat a bunch of bosses first time round. The true difficulty only comes true on a certain few bosses and situations. I’ve found so many other games that aren’t considered hard to be more difficult than Souls games.

I think people really exaggerate the difficulty in all honesty. I don’t know if this comes from only knowing about the games through reputation or because they only played it for a bit, but it seems like people imagine these impossible to win scenarios that take absolute precision and where one mistake can be fatal or you die in one hit. In 90% of situations you have a lot of leeway, a fair amount of forgiveness and multiple ways of beating an enemy or situation.

I would say they’re punishing more than they’re difficult. And I also find them to be pretty obtuse. I just don’t find it to be very fun to not know when or where I’m going to be able to save my progress again.

All the games save automatically every 30 seconds or so, lel. I guess you mean bonfires though. They’re usually on the main path so to speak, though occasionally they’re obfuscated. Won’t argue with it being obtuse to a degree, but then most fans would probably say that aspect is one of it’s selling points.

DS #1 in particular had an awful lot of its most convenient bonfires (the one that didn’t force you to repeat all of Sen’s Fortress if you died to the boss, for instance) hidden. I think this is actually pretty effective design in several ways, but if you never found them, you’d think the game was far more punishing than it is.

Pretty reductive way to describe it. An FPS would be shoot, shoot, reload, shoot. A platformer would be jump, jump, pickup item, jump. And so on. Anything’s crap if you minimalise the gameplay in a pejorative way.

There’s a second component to Dark Soul’s difficulty beyond just requiring proficiency (which is mostly about patience) and that’s heavy time penalties for failures.

It’s not that you lose a fight when you get impatient or otherwise flub a fight, the game often will send you on multi-minute run backs even if you’ve trivialized the challenges on the way.

In some ways that’s how I see the game being difficult, if you play for an hour that can mean only a few actual attempts on the difficult content where other games may offer you dozens of attempts in the same time frame.

There’s a second component to Dark Soul’s difficulty beyond just requiring proficiency (which is mostly about patience) and that’s heavy time penalties for failures.

Which is precisely why I never could get into the DS games. I have nothing against a challenge, and little against this trial-and-error approach on progress, but that I was forced to spent considerable amounts of time just to get back where I failed was just inexcusable to me. It felt as if the game was deliberately wasting my time.

I think it’s a bit unfair to call it a time-penalty. Obviously that’s not how it was intended to be interpreted by the devs nor how people who enjoy the game see it. The game is supposed to be played in loops until you know each path like steps in a dance – getting the intended experience can hardly be seen as a penalty. This is analogous to playing a track in Trackmania over again because you didn’t get the gold medal on your last run; replaying is the entire point and it wouldn’t be any fun if you only played each track once. It’s even like playing another round on the same map in CS. And like with tracks in Trackmania (or maps in CS) the point of this repetition is to allow you to grow a emotional connection to the intricacies of each area instead of constantly bombarting you with new but similar content that you never get the chance to truly know.

It’s fair game to not like this style of design but to call it a penalty is sort of missing the point I feel.

I’m wryly amused by the orange dots around Solaire, Firelink (presumably the crestfallen warrior), and the first bonfire in Anor Londo (presumably the firekeeper). Some people just can’t resist attacking those NPCs, I guess.

I gave up on Manus. He kept two shotting me and the run back to him took a bit too long for my liking so I ran up to Gwyn to see what he was like to fight. I almost killed him on my first go and the bloodlust took over so I went back and killed him properly. Magic build, couldn’t have gotten him so easily with melee.

I gave up at Manus. Should head back, but man, that was a year ago now. My Souls-fu was the best it’d ever been (mediocre objectively, but I could still take down Kalameet relatively easily) and Manus still utterly crushed me. Repeatedly. Facing him when those skills are all rusty… not sure I can face that.

I “cheesed” Kalameet using a crossbow. That fight took about 45 minutes, but I also severed the tail first, which also took about 15-20 minutes. My souls-fu has gotten slightly better since then, having recently cleared DS2 and DS3 DLCs, so these numbers might be a little bit inflated.

This map is a perfect example to all the open world RPGs and the players demanding bigger maps, obsessing over the amount of km2. The design is almost perfect and it shows that the world doesn’t have to be 6000 km2 to feel big and sprawling.

My mental map’s a little rusty, but that one pure orange line on the top left – that’s the balance beam with the bastard archers, isn’t it? If the boss was anyone but O+S I’d call those two the hardest enemies in Anor Londo.

Really cool visualization!
Reminds me, Dark Souls 2 has a worldwide death counter. It sits comfortably above 200 million by now, and I’d wager ~1 million of those deaths are the sole responsibility of Fume Knight.